Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market Edited By Mary Dellenbaugh, Markus Kip, Majken Bieniok, Agnes Katharina Müller and Martin Schwegmann Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag AG, 2015. ISBN: 978–3–03821-495-3; £22.99 (pbk (original) (raw)
Related papers
In the past years, the transiency of European city-making and dwelling has become increasingly hard to disregard. This urban flux calls for a methodological rethinking for those professionals, social and natural scientists, artists, and activists, with an interest in the processes of remaking and reclaiming urban space. With a practical and empirical emphasis, this anthology brings forth a variety of perspectives on urban appropriation strategies, their relation to public spacemaking, and their implications for future city development, exploring how ideas and practices of appropriation inform and relate to cultural narratives, politico-historical occasions as well as socio-ecological expressions. Flavia Alice Mameli comes from a design background (B.A., M.A. Industrial Design at Berlin University of the Arts) and conducts her doctoral research in the field of urban appropriation strategies. She is a passionate urban flâneuse and especially interested in the potential influence of space-making practices on urban developments. Franziska Polleter holds a degree in architecture and urban design from the Technical University of Munich (B.A.) and the Technical University of Berlin (M.A.). In her research, she focuses on new forms of dwelling and she is especially interested in the impact co-living housing has on redevelopments in urban environments. Mathilda Rosengren (B.A., M.A.) is a visual anthropologist and geographer with a particular interest in the relational structuring of urban nature. As a doctoral student in geography at the University of Cambridge, she takes part in the ERC funded research project Rethinking Urban Nature and examines the interrelations between notions of 'living with difference', 'unplanned' urban nature, and official urban planning in Berlin, Germany, and Gothenburg, Sweden. Josefine Sarkez-Knudsen (B.A., M.A.) is an ethnologist from the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen, where she works as a part-time lecturer. Combining her particular interests in migration and urban design, she explores the complexities of intercultural encounters in the context of urban everyday life. For further information: www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4170-7
The Journal of Public Space, 2019
Considering place-based participation a crucial factor for the development of sustainable and resilient cities in the post-digital turn age, this paper addresses the socio-spatial implications of the recent transformation of relationality networks. To understand the drivers of spatial claims emerged in conditions of digitally augmented spectacle and simulation, it focuses on changes occurring in key nodes of central urban public and semi-public spaces of rapidly developing cities. Firstly, it proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of problems related to socio-spatial fragmentation, polarisation and segregation of urban commons subject to external control. Secondly, it discusses opportunities and criticalities emerging from a representational paradox depending on the ambivalence in the play of desire found in digitally augmented semi-public spaces. The discussion is structured to shed light on specific socio-spatial relational practices that counteract the dissipation of the "common worlds" caused by sustained processes of urban gentrification and homogenisation. The theoretical framework is developed from a comparative critical urbanism approach inspired by the right to the city and the right to difference, and elaborates on the discourse on sustainable development that informs the New Urban Agenda. The analysis focuses on how digitally augmented geographies reintroduce practices of participation and commoning that reassemble fragmented relational infrastructures and recombine translocal social, cultural and material elements. Empirical studies on the production of advanced simulative and transductive spatialities in places of enhanced consumption found in Auckland, New Zealand, ground the discussion. These provide evidence of the extent to which the agency of the augmented territorialisation forces reconstitutes inclusive and participatory systems of relationality. The concluding notes, speculating on the emancipatory potential found in these social laboratories, are a call for a radical redefinition of the approach to the problem of the urban commons. Such a change would improve the capacity of urbanism disciplines to adequately engage with the digital turn and efficaciously contribute to a maximally different spatial production that enhances and strengthens democracy and pluralism in the public sphere.
Cityzenship: rightful presence and the urban commons
Citizenship Studies, 2016
How can we retain the political category of citizenship, a concept instituted firmly at the heart of European politics since the French revolution while shedding its anti-progressive baggage of exclusivity? Cityzenship, we argue, is one such possibility. It is the right to the city, the urban commons, extended to all residents, regardless of origin, identity or legality, based on the principle of 'rightful presence, ' as expressed in slogans like 'No One Is Illegal. ' But membership in an urban commons, we believe, is more than non-discriminatory access to public services guaranteed under sanctuary city mandates. The urban commons include public infrastructures as well as public spaces, places of culture and education, cafés, the street and the street corner along with the capacity to make and unmake these spaces. Access to the urban commons is organized not only via rights and laws, but also through what Sara Ahmed calls 'atmospheric walls, ' which although difficult to grasp are techniques for 'making spaces available to some more than to others. ' Whiteness, masculinity, and class privilege are good examples of immaterial walls with material effects. With the help of affect theory, we discuss one instance of a cityzenship actan off-space sculpture biennale held in a public park in Berlin-that breaks through the atmospheric walls of Western urbanism to offer, if only for a moment, an unmarked space for hospitality and solidarity.
Public Space : Between Reimagination and Occupation
2017
Between Reimagination and Occupation examines contemporary public space as a result of intense social production reflecting contradictory trends: the long-lasting effects of the global crisis, manifested in supranational trade-offs between political influence, state power and private ownership; and the appearance of global counter-actors, enabled by the expansion of digital communication and networking technologies and rooted into new participatory cultures, easily growing into mobile cultures of protest. The highlighted cases from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America reveal the roots of the pre-crisis processes of redistribution of capital and power as an aspect of the transition from the consumerist past into the post-consumerist present, by tracing the slow growth of social discontent that has led only a few years later to the mobilization of a new kind of self-conscious globally-acting class. This edited volume brings together a broad range of interdisciplinary discussions and approaches, providing sociologists, cultural geographers, and urban planning academics and students with an opportunity to explore the various social, cultural, economic and political factors leading to reappropriation and reimagination of the urban commons in the cities within which we live.
Urban Spaces in India, 2018
This article talks about the various shifts in the conception of ‘nature’ in Mumbai, to contextualize the various environmental conflicts, contestations and diverse claims over resources, space and place that have been witnessed by the city. It it evaluates the adoption of the ‘commons’ framework in the context of Mumbai and its use by communities and collectives as an instrument of resistance to the appropriation and commodification of urban space.
Over the past few years, we have witnessed the emergence of several social struggles that have reclaimed public spaces in a highly visible manner. Three of these struggles in particular, have attracted worldwide attention and interest, namely the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and Occupy Wall Street (OWS). This paper will argue that these movements have succeeded in capturing our imagination because they have demanded that we rethink the very meaning of the global commons in the aftermath of decades of neoliberal policies unleashed at the national and supranational levels. In fact, at the heart of each of the aforementioned struggles is a grassroots resistance to what amounts to a global enclosure movement-a regime of privatization, commodification, dispossession and disciplinary measures-which has deprived people of their right to the city. 2 Historically, public spaces are the place of assembly and politics. As such they are at the heart of any truly democratic society; and, increasingly, they are threatened by neoliberal governance. This is precisely why it is the form as much as the content of these recent waves of protest that is provoking debate, reaction and, oftentimes, state repression. From Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol to Zuccotti Park and Taksim Square, reclaiming spaces is about the way we do politics. Challenging state control over urban spaces represents a powerful move to resist the alarming global trend toward dispossession.
In, against, beyond and through the State. Limits and possibilities of Urban Commons in Barcelona
PhD Thesis - IUAV, Regional Planning and Public Policy; UAB, Politics, Policies and International Relations , 2018
In the last few decades the category of Common has re-emerged to draw a path of emancipation from capitalism without the State, reviving the thesis of autonomist Marxism. In this path, the Commons are autonomous social practices that produce emancipation, namely The Common, and through which The Common can be instituted. However, autonomist Common’s theories are characterized by a certain reticence to address how emancipation can take place without the State. Considering that the relation with the State in contemporary Western society is ineludible, the research aims to assess the role of the State in the autonomist Common’s emancipatory project. The analysis is set in the urban environment focusing on the relation between Urban Commons and the (local) State. The thesis hypothesizes that Urban Commons may need the support of the (local) State and this may flank the production of The Common with its own production of emancipation: The Public. Adopting a relational approach to the analysis of the case of Barcelona, the thesis demonstrates that Urban Commons need the (local) State. Many of them need the resources and the recognition of the (local) State, despite these may affect their autonomy, and all of them would benefit from a further support of the (local) State in terms of regulation, public policies and planning. However, despite the (local) State could theoretically flank The Common widening the spectrum of emancipation, it does not appear to do so. When the (local) State meets The Common it tends to replace it with The Public, and The Public tends to hinder and spatially marginalise The Common. Hence, Urban Commons should continue their struggle for autonomy. However, they should also struggle to obtain forms of support from the (local) State, preventing the latter from limiting their autonomy, transforming The Common into The Public, maintaining the hegemony of the production of emancipation and spatially marginalizing The Common. The thesis concludes sustaining that, as sustained by the autonomist Commons theories, the Common’s emancipatory project can be constructed without taking over the State but it cannot avoid to securing forms of support from the State.
Urban commons in practice: housing cooperativism and city-making
Research Handbook on Urban Sociology, 2024
The urban commons is a concept that has gained popularity in recent years to account for collective alternatives to capitalist urban political economies. This chapter engages with cooperative housing as a practical manifestation of the urban commons and brings to relief the key dimensions that shape its accessibility, scale, and resilience, as well as its interaction with wider urban processes. The empirical backdrop for the analysis is the experiences of housing cooperativism in Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Montevideo. In these cities, cooperative housing has expanded in the context of favourable policy environments and has better preserved its collective and (partially) decommodified characteristics when nested within multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder organisational and institutional frameworks. An urban sociological approach here contributes to better grasping the interplay between structure and agency in the development of cooperative housing commons.